I'm running a cluster on 8 Sun Blade 100's with gentoo 2005.1.r-1 (the system is in production and I haven't had time to migrate to 2006.0).

I need to install the SDSC tool for grid storage called SRB (storage resource broker), it requires a java VM and PostgreSQL. How well does blackdown-jdk work? How much has it been tested? Does anyone know any serious bugs? Is there an alternative to it?

Unfortunately, there is no good working JDK or JRE for Linux on SPARC. The blackdown implementation is quite old, has security holes and tends to be crash-happy for a lot of people. Blackdown's website states they will have an updated release for the Linux on SPARC port when their Java 1.5 implementation comes out, but so far there hasn't really been any response from blackdown as to when that might be.

Right now, there are no other alternatives for a working JDK/JRE environment on Linux/SPARC.

But, I have to agree, the current implementation is not very stable at all

Yeah, that would be nice. However if its anything like the sources you can currently build for the Mustang pre-releases (Java 1.6), it requires a working JDK (in Mustang's case, it appears you need a 1.5 JDK). If that is the case, it could turn out to be a bit problematic, but hopefully not total roadblock.

Blackdown 1.4.1-r1 is horribly unstable running tomcat apps on my 220R - crashes within a few hours. The only option I've found for running java apps on that hardware is to switch to Solaris 10. Here's hoping the rumored 1.5 release for Sparc will add some much-needed stability.